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Wednesday, September 4, 2013

A pinch of this and a dash of that!

Hi, folks. It's Louise M. Gouge again. When I teach my humanities classes, I tell my students that many ancient civilizations had their own forms of musical notation.

But because we have no idea how those notations translate into sound, we can’t play their music.

A similar situation exists with recipes. If you have your great-grandmother’s recipe for trifle, and it uses measures such as gills, scruples, pinches, or dashes, how can you tell how much of your ingredients to measure into the bowl?

Help is on the way! Just take a look at these equivalent measurements for some of your favorite measuring devices, and soon you’ll be able to make great-grandmother’s trifle just as well as she did.﻿ Here are just a few of the measures she would have used:

My daughter and grandchildren were baking a favorite old recipe today, but they used our modern measures.

Here’s dessert,
a Dutch apple pie we quickly devoured.

The following antique
recipe comes from Laurie Alice Eakes, and sounds delicious but not all that easy
to make. Makes me glad for readymade sweets.

Chocolate Drops Eighteenth
Century Style: To Make Confectionary Drops

Take double refined sugar,
pound and sift it through a hair sieve, not too fine; then sift it through a
silk sieve to take out all the fine dust which would destroy the beauty of the
drop. Put the sugar into a clean pan, and moisten it with any favourite
aromatic. Colour it with a small quantity of liquid carmine, or any other
colour, ground fine. Take a small pan with a lip, fill it three parts with
paste, place it on a small stove, the half hole being the size of the pan, and
stir the sugar with a little ivory or bone handle, until it becomes
liquid. When it almost boils, take it from the fire and continue to stir
it: if it be too moist, take a little of the powdered sugar, and add a spoonful
to the paste, and stir it till it is of such a consistence as to run without
too much extension. Have a tin plate, very clean and smooth; take the
little pan in the left hand, and hold in the right a bit of iron, copper, or
silver wire, four inches long, to take off the drop from the lip of the pan,
and let it fall regularly on the tin plate; two hours afterwards, take off the
drops with the blade of a knife.

Sounds exactly like
chocolate chips, doesn’t it? Yum!

Do you have an old family
recipe? Would you share it with us?

Louise M. Gouge writes for Harlequin’s Love Inspired
Historicals. She is an English and humanities instructor at Valencia College in
Kissimmee, Florida. Please visit her Web site at http://blog.Louisemgouge.com . Her July
2013 release, A Lady of Quality, is
still available at Amazon.com.

Catherine Du Coeur is determined
to uncover the truth about wealthy Lord Winston, who falsely accused her father
of treason. But the closer she gets to the handsome young nobleman, the more
she wonders how such a benevolent gentleman could have conspired to commit such
evil. Baron Lord Winston has had little success in finding an accomplished
aristocratic bride who is suited to his diplomatic aspirations. But when he
meets Miss Du Coeur, a countess’s lowly companion, he finds that family
connections are far less important than matters of the heart.

14 comments:

I don't have any with gills and scruples, that's for sure, but I have seen some odd things in old books. Thanks for the comparison list, Louise!

I love the old recipes we have, handed down and hand written. Such a treasure! I have many but I think it's great to have my grandmother's recipe for Red Velvet Cake, as it somehow made some big surge in popularity again. I don't know where that started (the recent interest) but it's definitely been around a long time.

I have all my grandmother's old recipes and I learned to cook with dashes and pinches and fistful of ingredients when I was a very young girl. That led me to majoring in Home Economics in college. When I asked for old family recipes on my blog, I got some really good ones. Also found some great ones in the old cookbooks I have. I have so many cookbooks that I had to finally pick and choose which ones I really couldn't do without and the ones I could store away. The extras filled a large plastic storage container.

Louise, I featured one of my grandmother's old German recipes, German Fruitcake on my post about our German culture in foods. I haven't made it in a long time, but maybe I will this year. It's a great Christmas cake.

wonderful post today, made me think of Mom's cooking, she never used a recipe that I know of -just used her hands and went to it, she was a great cook and cooked many things.I enjoy reading your LIH books Louise...thanks for the memories today

I loved your post today and found it most interesting. So many things change over time and I always find it wonderful to look back to the way things were. My grandmother was a wonderful cook and I can remember her in her kitchen stirring her pan of the delicious divinity she was whipping up for Christmas. Also, I can just see her beautiful pies, coconut, chocolate, and pecan setting atop her buffet. My mouth is watering just thinking back!

Many years ago, when my children were still at home, I did a lot of pinch and dash measuring, too. As for those many handwritten recipies gathered from friends, I gave them to my daughter when she married. Now that she's widowed and lives with us again, she's brought those recipes home again. She and I make them for the grandkids. It's a great legacy to pass on to the next generation.

Great post, Louise! I have several recipes handed down from my mom. The one I treasure most is the persimmon pudding recipe from her mom--my maternal grandmother. As part of the ingredients, it lists "A lump of butter the size of a walnut." I've guessed that to be about 1 1/2 Tablespoons. :)

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